Category: Television

What she does, when I discern something like doing, seems to hover between great style and great anonymity.

The style of some actors reveals itself in vocal and somatic stillness.

Others, through a clipped or frenzied movement.

In neither case do I receive the actor’s work as a full expression. Full as in the purported aptitude of form to enact (perfectly) a content. The notion that an actor might communicate with precision an inner sorrow, joy, or turmoil is to me absurd.

The silent and frenetic actors whom I enjoy never entirely convey their characters. There is too much that cannot be seen or heard. So the actor’s presence is a shape: a gravity, a sonority. Her personality resists novelization.

In this sense, style—or stylization—is a kind of anonymity. Actors of camp are virtually unrecognizable, as actors and as quotidian subjects.

I think that when style increases, anonymity increases also. But I also think that anonymity increases when style decreases. Anonymity always increases.

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I love cooking for people, but tend to be nervous about it. I also haven’t done much of it since I moved to Denver three years ago, but I usually do a good bit when I’m visiting my family in Bangalore. On my most recent visit I made my folks risotto with clams. My brother said, “It’s like khichdi but Italian.”

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I cry almost every episode of Netflix’s Chef’s Table. I think it’s easily the best original series they’ve made.

If you don’t know, Chef’s Table devotes each episode to a different world-renowned chef. Some of them have Michelin stars, some don’t—but judging by Season 1, they’re all compelling, driven, philosophically-minded people. And some may not be as famous as other chefs who might have been invited to be profiled in this way, as this article on Ana Roš suggests.

There is something odd about having this relationship with fine dining when I really don’t fine dine. At all.

And something precarious too, because food as art only ever throws into relief food as utterly basic to living—not “a way of” of living, as though you could find a beautiful way to be destitute.

And yet I’m weeping over these chef’s creations, which I’m not ever going to eat. Part of it must be the honesty of it all, naked stories of struggle and triumph. And part of it is—not the dishonesty exactly—but what’s lurking under all of the very articulate—maybe over-articulated—philosophies which really are more like political statements.

Some of the weeping happened during the Dan Barber episode in Season 1, who comes off surprisingly unlikeable—not maybe in general, but to me. Barber goes into this thing about how he can’t really leave his kitchen in the hands of others and he has to be there, always. I think what I didn’t like about him is what I don’t like about myself.